What I posted this morning was a mess, I confessed it so in my tags, but it was a necessary mess because thanks to trying to write out my thoughts, I managed to single out what exactly bothers me about the whole situation. (It is always the process you must go through to get your ideas clear, first you try to express it confusingly on paper, then you think about it other and see what you wanted to tell - but whereas most people keep the draft version for themselves, I tend to post them. I'm that kind of masochistic freak sometimes)
What troubles me so much with the way sentences like "The creator has favorites/The creator plays favorites with their character" evolved is tied to the existence, use and evolution of one Internet slang, an expression which played a part in the shifting of minds: Creator's Pet.
I am especially, especially thinking about that one page from TV Tropes and Idioms: Creator's Pet (often confused with the TV Tropes-terminology The Scrappy, sometimes leading to statements like The Creator's Scrappy). As usual, everything returns to TV Tropes and Idioms... While I love this website and can defend it in many ways, I grew to understand why a lot of people gained distrust or dislike of it - because of how preponderant, influential, referential it became on the Internet lanscape as a whole, when the website itself is flawed, limited, biased and under constant rewrite. It is NOT some sort of absolute trope encyclopedia as people believe (there's an ungodly amount of famous cultural tropes not included in there), but it became the map that a lot of people have been using on the Internet to the point its terminology became "common Internet language".
And it leads to problems when you have things such as "The Creator's Pet". In fact when you open the page nowadays you have a warning at the top telling you "Beware, this page is based on opinion alone". "The Creator's Pet", while a true and existing concept, is one that can only be fully and justly applied by an unbiased, neutral mind with a complete overview of a given story or body of fiction. And the Internet is all but unbiased. So it became a purely biased concept, an opinion-based name that proudly refutes the idea of being neutral - which in turns is a problem because the very concept is destined for an unbiased view... But let us escape this infinite loop to get to the specific problem I want to point out.
The idea of a "Creator's Pet" was an euphemism to designate a character who is undergoing an obvious and blatant favoritism process by the creators themselves, resulting in the character's presence being detrimental to the story and lowering the quality of the narrative... YET, if you check the TV Tropes description above, it is also presented as a case of the creator's favoritism, likes, and thus intentions, clashing with the fans' own preferences, appreciation and consumption of a body of work. "Fans hate the characters yet the creator loves it". That's how it is bluntly put. Not even "audience" here, the word used is "fan"... Is it a way to refer to the audience as a whole or the specific active "fandom" as opposed to silent consumers? But let's not digress too much.
As you can see, there is yet again a mixture of an unbiased point of view (a character is detrimental to the balance, structure or quality of a story) and of a biased one (a character is disliked by some people when liked by others - and these others happen to be the one running the show, so to speak). It results in a weird and bizarre balance that used to work... simply because the main use of "Creator's Pet" was for long-running series and various serial forms of fiction. Television series, cartoons, book series, film franchises. These sort of things, that happened over time, over years, with various seasons, things of the sort. Where you had a basis to go from to then judge whether the story was "derailed or not". To know if a character or writing choice is detrimental to a story, you need first to have a story to "make wrong". You need to have a start, a basis - like a first movie, a first set of books, a first season, things of the sort. Then the fandom wars can join the critics' reviews and the many talks of fiction-making.
But when it comes to "indie creations" and "web fiction", such as web comics, indie cartoons, things of the sort, the foulest flaws of the "Creator's Pet" logic starts to rise, because... these works are being made in direct. In live. Immediately before your eyes. You get to see the episode being made before you, and then you go on a show episode after episode, or chapter after chapter, meaning very often, your basis for the "basis" of the story, your basis for what the story "should" be, or the "good" of the series is very often... the first episode. The first chapter. One episode. One chapter. The equivalent of what for television series was a "Pilot" episode, sometimes never to be aired. Which changes everything, because while before you had an actual "full story" so to speak to jump from, a whole book, a whole film, nowadays people start judging works from the beginning of the story. Not a full story, not a complete narrative, just... the premises. The set-up. The introduction.
And so people will start accusing creators of having "favorites" or "playing favorites" when in fact they are merely unfolding the story as they wanted it to be, as they planned it to be for the beginning, and thus reveal who was meant to be the focus character(s) or the main character(s). Which we simply didn't know about because... well the first chapter of a book or the first scene of a movie is not supposed to set up everything about the story. Yet, in the world of the Internet and the perception of indie audiences, it seems that nowadays, a "Pilot" is treated as a "Bible", and they weirdly consider that a Pilot is like a contract passed with a community of "fans", when in fact it is merely a selling sign, a starting point, a sample to entice the customers.
The perfect image would be of this. You are waiting to undergo a specific journey down a specific path, a prepared trail that you decided to go through and that has been set up for you by the owners of the place. So you get to the starting point, and you look beyond to the landscape, or architecture, or whatever, that you are going to cross. And as you wait for the guide to come, you start pointing out all the different ways, the different paths, the different rooms, the different places and areas you will go to, or you want to go to, or you are curious to go to. And you start planning ahead the journey passing by those places. Yet, when the guide arrives, and they tell you that you undergo this specific path, that passes by these specific places, and nowhere else, you start getting and pointing out it is not the best path, nor the good path, and that you should go to these other places instead.
But the guide looks at you and explains to you that, there are no trails to go to these places, that these rooms are not for the public to enter, that there's no actual journeying structure to reach the points you want to reach, and that if you want to undergo the journey you wanted, that you asked for, then you must go down that one path that is the prepared, ready, intended path, which is the planned, sold and prepared journey. And which you have not even underwent, since you are stuck at the starting point wanting to go elsewhere. Sure, these other places you want to reach exist, and you can reach them... But you imagined the path to them, you created these other journeys that never were, and so to reach these places you will need to make your own trails and paths and journeying structures. By your own effort, since the guide won't just create it out of the blue for you when you don't want to take the intended path they have prepared. You can go on and create your own path, but you will do so onto someone else's land, into somebone else's building, by someone else's property. And this causes some... logistical problems so to speak.
Allegory over. Now by the end I veered into a criticism of "fanwork culture" as, from a genuine homage, show of love or need for "fictional justice", I saw it too often become a vessel for spoiled childish minds who believed that copyright is a useless thing, that creators are dead before they even wrote the first sentence, and that any work they love simply happens to belong to them. But the topic of the corruption of "Creator's Pet" is one that cannot be separated from the mindset caused by the twisting of the "fanfiction mindset".
Because nowadays, people use the idea that "creators have favorites" as... inherently bad in itself. By simplifying the TV Tropes-invented concept of "Creator's Pet" (which is not even an actual trope, it is a pattern, not a trope) to these two words, people started believing and assuming that a creator showing any particular bias towards one of their characters as part of a cast is wrong. That for a creator itself to not treat all of their characters in absolute uniformity is wrong. "Favoritism means bad writing", which is... a weird, incomprehensible, bizarre sentence for anybody who dealt in fiction making since you know storyteller relies on specific characters to spin their stories, and that as such the storyteller will have to rely on specific characters to have a book to write, a movie to film, a story to tell.
The original idea of the concept was when a creator was utterly blinded by their love for the character that they ruined or wasted a promising, pre-established, already-good story, often to the point of creating an obvious gap between the way the character is written and how the character is presented, which are two ifferent things. And again, it is a concept that works in franchises, in multi-seasonal series, but when projects like webcomics or web animations or indie series are creating, crafting, moment-by-moment, episode-by-episode, chapter-by-chapter their story, in front of an audience who gets to see some of the process, like those Japanese chefs that cook in front of their guests the meal (the exact name eludes me as I write these lines)... Well here, it becomes increasingly clear that the genuine criticism of the story's quality is utterly mingled with the audience's expectations and imaginations based on how the story will go, when the story has not even been told yet, but is being told. The creator nows the story, starts revealing it, unveiling it slowly (for the story is being crafted beyond the veil as it is being slowly pulled), yet the audience starts claiming they also know the story, because they think they can guess the shapes beyond the veil... when in fact it is often misguided judgement based on their own preconceptions and personal tastes, projected onto vague, blurry bumps and shadows behind the veil. Even worse than Plato's Cavern, as the people projecting the shadow are being created as their shadows are cast. [To contrast this, with a television series for example, when the veil is pulled, it is pulled off an already fully-prepared and built structure, a season, that had been prepared beforehand then veiled and uncovered]
I believe it is this "Let's allow people to see how we craft the story along" technique, as opposed to the "Let's show people the full story we crafted in hope they will want more and thus we will expand it", that results in this weird idea that a creator can't do as they please anymore, a storyteller can't tell their story but rather is to tell the story that their audience claims to be "entitled" to. When the one thing reasonable people should do, is instead judge the storyteller for the whole story once it is done, or judge them for how a so-called "sequel story" is of loser quality to a "basic story" offered. To criticize a piece of story is like criticizing a detail in a painting: sure it has its use, its effect, its need, but when you solely know this detail and have never seen the full painting, it loses meaning and sense to obsess so much about this one detail.
Mind you, I am not saying that we can't make indie stories or judge indie productions chapter by chapter, episode by episode. It is the format that is being made today, it is how things are being done, the pure interaction between audience and creators is something that had been lost and is being done as it never was before, in a quite wondrous ways. I have seen it be wonderful experiences and awesome journeys, with no problems whasoever. Unfortunately more and more it is pointed out that these type of "interactive experience" and "direct communication" is being a cause of misery for everybody involved, as nowadays an episode or a chapter or even a page of a webcomic is treated as a full season or movie or book used to be treated. People's basic unit for a "story" has dramatically shortened on the Internet, which results in weird blurs and entire rewiring of concepts we thought we knew. Thus... from "The creator is being oblivious to how they are being a bad writer by focusing so much on one character to the point of wasting the rest of the world they created ; or that they can't even see what the rest of the world they created actually looks like", we went to people thinking "If a creator makes any character more of a central character than another because they planned their story around them, then they are wrong, because a creator's intentions do not matter, it is what the audience will want that matters first and foremost".
I am using this specific example but it is not the first time I am getting worried and angry at how people preach a "death of the author" so intense you'd think they just want free commissions out of artists - not wanting to be told a story, disregarding utterly and completely the creators' point of view as if completely irrelevant, and putting their personal taste and preferences and desires above everything else. Words like "The work belongs to its fans" is taking a nasty, nasty turn, as it leads to an utter disrespect of creators, both direct and indirect (actors are getting more and more criticized, in the bad way, for putting their thought out when it comes to the character they literaly play and bring to life - as if, again, actors had no part to play in how a character is made, which is an utterly silly statement).
Digressions upon digressions: that's me. But I do warn you. The line is getting thin between people objectively pointing out creators have a BIG bias problem, resulting in a writing with a lack of self-consciousness, and people simply not wanting a creator to tell the story they want to tell, forcing onto them a childish "No, that's not how it should go, THAT'S how it should go, look I drew you all of it, now do it" behavior. The line is still there, thanks the muses, but... it is getting blurry and sentences like "The creator is playing favorite", repeated again and again across media and years and circles, is starting to get viciously ambivalent and ambiguous. Simply because of shortened time. Back in my days (for I feel old beyond my age), nobody would have ever thought of saying that a creator was "playing favorites in a way that ruins the show" by episode 2 of a series. Nowadays... it is becoming more normal. All leading to the question of: what type of story-unit or time-measure should we now undergo to appreciate the quality and evolution of a work's storytelling?